Breaking Blades
Copyright© 2026 by FozzieBare
Chapter 3: YARD SALE!
<Grottin> finished logging in.
He hadn’t volunteered for the crusade force currently heading toward Reforged space. Truth be told, he was a marginal pilot and didn’t have an in with any of the battalion commanders.
He had mostly joined the Blades because it gave him something to do.
It wasn’t glamorous, but he got to work with the guild’s stuff, and that was pretty cool. He’d log in for an hour or two, move materials from a refinery to guild storage, maybe do a couple Arena battles or one of the mock campaigns the game provided for its PvE players.
The first thing he noticed as he walked his machine into the factory courtyard was the activity.
He idly wondered what was going on.
Most of the Blades were aboard ships that were about to touch down on Reforged planets.
As he got closer, he toggled Guild Chat.
<Grottin>: Hey guys. Busy day.
There was no response.
Then something he had noticed without really noticing finally registered.
Those WarMACs?
They were showing red on his targeting system.
That meant...
There were six Reforged WarMACs standing in the courtyard.
One of them turned toward him.
<Grottin> stared at it.
The WarMAC stared back.
“Uh.”
His machine exploded.
It was over that fast.
Grottin sat there for a moment.
Then he pinched himself, just to make sure he hadn’t somehow logged in while still asleep.
Nope.
Wide awake.
Which meant...
He needed to tell somebody.
Who?
No idea.
The invasion wasn’t a heroic pitched conflict across multiple fronts.
It wasn’t even a battle.
Battles required two sides that knew they were fighting.
This was Reforged arriving on worlds whose defenders were mostly scattered across alternate characters, asleep, at work, eating dinner, or halfway across the UaW map invading Reforged.
The people who did log in tended to arrive one at a time.
Their reactions followed roughly the same progression.
Confusion.
Disbelief.
Profanity.
Then, usually, incoming fire.
Followed shortly afterward by the “defenders’” WarMACs undergoing rapid explosive disassembly.
There was one unifying thought among everyone who experienced the phenomenon.
Reforged wasn’t supposed to be here.
They were supposed to be way over there, waiting to get run over by the crusade.
The first planet fell under Reforged control in roughly thirty-seven minutes.
Ulysses V took forty-five.
Mostly because three friends had logged in at roughly the same time and managed to avoid destruction long enough to link up before a platoon of Reforged WarMACs hunted them down with extreme prejudice.
By the end of three hours, three planets had fallen, and two more were under attack.
Word had gone out through panicked yelling, excessive profanity in Guild Chat, and eventually an All-Hands email.
DO NOT LOG IN TO HOMEWORLD ALTS! WE ARE AWARE OF THE SITUATION.
Being aware of the situation and being able to do anything about it were two very different things.
Finally, the people still outside the invasion force stopped logging into their homeworld alts.
There wasn’t much point in showing up if all you were going to do was get blasted the second somebody spotted you.
That shit got expensive fast, and for no fucking purpose.
Meanwhile, aboard the Blade invasion flotilla, everyone was having what could charitably be described as a difficult evening.
Less charitably, they were reenacting Fifty Shades of WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON.
Officer Chat had exploded.
Guild Chat had exploded.
Darren’s private messages had exploded.
Three planets were gone.
Two more were under attack.
There were so many incoming-message pings that Darren eventually muted the sound just so he could think straight.
<TravDontCallMeTravis>: BOSS.
<HeyNon>: I FUCKING KNOW.
<TravDontCallMeTravis>: DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH SHIT I HAD BACK THERE?
<HeyNon>: I SAID I FUCKING KNOW.
Then the last two planets fell.
Five planets.
The entirety of <TenMillionBlades>’ industrial base.
Everything that wasn’t already with the invasion fleet, or aboard supply ships currently making their way toward Reforged space.
Gone.
Darren closed his eyes.
This was a debacle.
No.
Not strong enough.
This was a goddamn clusterfuck.
They stared at the strategic map.
Five worlds, formerly the dark black of <TenMillionBlades>, now glowed Reforged-blue.
It didn’t last.
One turned green.
The color of the 905th Mechanized.
<Whack>: What the fuck? Did 905th take it back from those fuckers? They hate us!
A second turned red.
The SlamCrew logo appeared over the world.
<PoBoiAlex>: Okay. This is bizarre shit. Were they all in it together?
A third turned white.
The Iron Masons had acquired some new territory.
<TravDontCallMeTravis>: SERIOUSLY? THE MASONS NOW HAVE MY SHIT??
If <TenMillionBlades> had taken human form at that moment, it would have been coughing up blood from rage, despair, disbelief, and sheer fucking confusion.
<HeyNon>: Howweird, tell me what the fuck is going on out there. Why are our enemies, who we supposedly have a truce with, owning OUR FUCKING WORLDS? They promised not to conquer them.
<HowYaDoin>: They didn’t.
<HeyNon>: The map tells a very fucking different story, How.
<HowYaDoin>: They didn’t conquer them. They bought them.
<HeyNon>: What the fucking hell do you mean, they bought them?
<TravDontCallMeTravis>: You’re saying Reforged attacked our planets, including MY factories, just to turn around and sell them to somebody else?
<HowYaDoin>: After stripping them of everything they could carry, and some things they had to pry off the ground, yes.
The bottom dropped out of Darren’s stomach.
The true scale of the disaster had finally revealed itself.
It wasn’t just that Reforged had come in and taken their homeworlds.
It wasn’t even that they had stripped away everything they could carry and apparently taken off again.
They had done all of that, then sold the worlds to the Blades’ enemies.
Enemies who had armistices with <TenMillionBlades>.
Which meant the planets had been moved firmly beyond any reasonable attempt to simply take them back.
They had a deal.
Reforged hadn’t come to conquer.
They had come to strip-mine.
Everything that had been sitting in the factories. The hangars full of spare machines. The guild banks and stockpiles. Raw materials, manufactured parts, ammunition, fuel, anything that could be loaded onto a ship.
All of it disappeared into the voracious maw of Reforged.
They had probably nearly bankrupted themselves renting every supply carrier they could get their hands on.
Now those carriers were nearly full from just the first three planets.
The credits from selling the worlds would go toward hiring even more ships to haul the rest home.
Buying a Blade planet from Reforged was considerably cheaper than conquering one from the Blades.
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